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Saturday, 31 December 2016

THE HOPES AND FEARS OF ALL THE YEARS

I stopped looking back on 2016 about three months ago, when
I stopped keeping a regular diary. I like to keep a diary, because I like to
have a sense of my own history. Just as everyone uses (and should use) history
to make sense of their present, a diary is something I can use to keep track of
how I think, what I make of events as they occur, and to trip myself up when I
realise I could have approached things in a better way.

I had stopped keeping a diary because the events of this
year became a bit, well, overwhelming, as I am sure it did for many. Numerous
reviews of the year centred on the political world events – Brexit, Trump, increasing
nationalism, Syria – and the deaths of people who were not done with life, like
George Michael and Carrie Fisher, to name only two from just the last week.
There is sense of, “I’ll come back to this later” – needing that bit of
distance, to have the right perspective of things, before you can start to make
sense of them.

What you can do is hope that 2017 will be a better year.
Certainty seems a bit passé these days, as the UK voted for Brexit, but not what kind
of Brexit, and there are people in the United States fearing for what their next
President might have for them in the coming weeks. You can do all you can to
make 2017 the best year for yourself, but you hope it can be a better year for
all.The one discouraging thing about
hope is that I thought it invoked a feeling of trust, only for my dictionary to
relegate that to a secondary meaning, listing it as “archaic.”

Therefore, in 2017, I hope that:

…people prove my dictionary wrong.

…I keep a diary for every day, even on those rare days when
nothing really happened.

…people remember that populism works both ways – if your
leader does not work for you, you can get them out

…Brexit is a success for everyone, because it has to be, and
the bed we have to lie in is not too hard, and not too soft

…the next time we have to vote for something, we are given
the implementation plan beforehand

…people stop using the Nazis as a comparison for anything
they don’t like – overuse means you start looking for something worse which,
hopefully, doesn’t exist

…people get bored of talking about the political “Left” and “Right,”
as it’s too simplistic, and too dismissive a label to slap across people

…people make up their minds on what public toilets
transgender people can use, before I piss on their shoes.

…the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland remains as the United Kingdom, the home of the BBC, the NHS, Penguin
Books, free art galleries, grumbling about the weather, queueing, and unidentified
items in the bagging area.